I sincerely hope stolen coins get frozen. Crypto scum should never be allowed to profit from their crime. It undermines trust into the community and gives them ideas to repeat the whole process.

I don't know if this is a good solution. because all coins are created equal, and frozen coin means even censorship.Actually in such case could be the right solution (why an exchange need to deal with stolen coins?)But one day the community could argue the same for coins passed form a political activist or even the government could decide to mark a coin

The coins are not frozen by the network itself

They might have been frozen by a third part (like an exchange, mixer, or web wallet) just like any other coins can be frozen or expropriated for a multitude of reasons. I don't think it is the same or amounts to banks freezing transfers of a certain client by a direct order from an authoritative body. In other words, if you have stolen some coins (I'm in no case endorsing that activity), this doesn't prevent you from sending them anywhere as long as you still have the ownership over these coins (read you keep the keys). Whether some miners might choose not to confirm your transactions is another matter

I have doubt that they will choose to move them through some smaller and local exchanges as these exchanges are not much expert in that cases.But before any further disappearance I want that the developer start work to recover tha stolen bitcoin if they will get success in recovering that then no one in the future will ever think to hack bitcoins.

I have doubt that they will choose to move them through some smaller and local exchanges as these exchanges are not much expert in that cases.But before any further disappearance I want that the developer start work to recover tha stolen bitcoin if they will get success in recovering that then no one in the future will ever think to hack bitcoins.

This mission would not be easy at all since we all know the capability of bitcoin regarding on transfer and we do know that there are mixers out there which would really makes those coin would be hard to be traced even we saw it it starts to move now.If they will use exchanges then they should be aware.

This transparency of the open ledger has always been something that has made Bitcoin seem so very special to me. The very idea of tracking funds (and as here in the Bitfinex case: stolen funds) on a ledger that anyone in the world can see is pretty exciting.

This is not the first bitcoin exchange hack and not a single coin has been recovered till now,it is good to see people actively monitoring the wallets containing the coin,since the number of wallets are huge it is really difficult to monitor all of them and top of that the hacker must be a brilliant individual who knows how to handle these coins.

Even by doing all sorts of pretty work of hacking the wallets, but still the hacker is not able to enjoy it, it should be a long term process as now he will also be knowing that all his wallets are open to the world so any transactions to this wallets will lead him to the trouble. So it will take more years to clear it for him.

But it is better than stealing a bank,you are not hurting anyone to enjoy your loot you need to have patience if not you will be caught without any doubt,i really hope these hackers get caught and be dealt with seriously and made an example out of it so that future wanna be hackers would think twice before doing these sort of activities.

This transparency of the open ledger has always been something that has made Bitcoin seem so very special to me. The very idea of tracking funds (and as here in the Bitfinex case: stolen funds) on a ledger that anyone in the world can see is pretty exciting.

This is not the first bitcoin exchange hack and not a single coin has been recovered till now,it is good to see people actively monitoring the wallets containing the coin,since the number of wallets are huge it is really difficult to monitor all of them and top of that the hacker must be a brilliant individual who knows how to handle these coins.

Even by doing all sorts of pretty work of hacking the wallets, but still the hacker is not able to enjoy it, it should be a long term process as now he will also be knowing that all his wallets are open to the world so any transactions to this wallets will lead him to the trouble. So it will take more years to clear it for him.

But it is better than stealing a bank,you are not hurting anyone to enjoy your loot you need to have patience if not you will be caught without any doubt,i really hope these hackers get caught and be dealt with seriously and made an example out of it so that future wanna be hackers would think twice before doing these sort of activities

They will certainly think twice, how to not get caught

Or do you really think that the threat of punishment have stopped somebody from stealing? If it were so, there wouldn't be thieves already. Even the high chances of being caught wouldn't prevent from stealing since it would only make thieves more sophisticated and subtle in their attempt to avoid being caught in the end. I heard a story about a family of pickpockets who organized their "headquarters" right under the gallows where their kind were hanged, and when someone was executed they were emptying the pockets of the mob

Around 120000 BTC have been stolen from bitfinex.It is not yet clear whether the theft was an inside job or whether hackers were able to gain access to the system externally.The attacker has moved at least 153 BTCs with 38 transactions.If the attackers bring it to an exchange, we can expect a huge dump in bitcoin price as they have to sell it as soon as possible.I hope all the other exchanges like kraken will also freeze the bitcoins."For an attacker, the cost-benefit strategy is quite easy: How much is in the pot and how likely is it that I'm getting the pot?"

I seriously wonder if these stolen coins will ever be recovered? I mean, it doesn't seem impossible with companies devoted to blockchain analysis. Does anyone know of any examples of large Bitcoin thefts where the perpetrators were caught in the end?

Im afraid not enough analysis will ever be enough if they know what they are doing. All they need to do is run the coins through the Helix tumbler using Tor. Yes it will take a while since it has a limit of coins, so it will be made in small batches and some money will be lost due the fees, but they can end up cutting the trace of the coins. Unfortunately at that point it's clear the coins will never be ever recovered.

Around 120000 BTC have been stolen from bitfinex.It is not yet clear whether the theft was an inside job or whether hackers were able to gain access to the system externally.The attacker has moved at least 153 BTCs with 38 transactions.

May be he/they are just trying to move coins in small batch so that it will be hard for any exchange platform to blacklist all of the associated bitcoin address. If there will be like 100k and more address which will receive those stolen bitcoin, than it will be almost impossible to find out all of the associated addresses.

I don't think we will see any huge and instant dump, may be they will continuously sell in small batches for years.

I have doubt that they will choose to move them through some smaller and local exchanges as these exchanges are not much expert in that cases.But before any further disappearance I want that the developer start work to recover tha stolen bitcoin if they will get success in recovering that then no one in the future will ever think to hack bitcoins.

This mission would not be easy at all since we all know the capability of bitcoin regarding on transfer and we do know that there are mixers out there which would really makes those coin would be hard to be traced even we saw it it starts to move now.If they will use exchanges then they should be aware.

Yeah that is right there is some tools which make the anonymity of bitcoin much stricter. I also think that it will be hard for to recover and find those people who have stolen these bitcoin. But I do not think that it will be possible or not but the idea is in my mind that how will it be it if those address are blocked by any way or these addresses is made blacklisted and the exchanges make it blocked for their sites.

Around 120000 BTC have been stolen from bitfinex.It is not yet clear whether the theft was an inside job or whether hackers were able to gain access to the system externally.The attacker has moved at least 153 BTCs with 38 transactions.If the attackers bring it to an exchange, we can expect a huge dump in bitcoin price as they have to sell it as soon as possible.I hope all the other exchanges like kraken will also freeze the bitcoins."For an attacker, the cost-benefit strategy is quite easy: How much is in the pot and how likely is it that I'm getting the pot?"

As to me, it still smells very fishy

All the addresses are starting with 3, so they require more than one signature to move the funds. How could the attacker possibly steal all the keys if it was not an inside job (I obviously discard the situation where Bitfinex had all the keys in one place from all 120k bitcoins). On the other hand, the hackers might have already earned millions of dollars by just shorting Bitcoin before the hack. So why would they need to move the coins at all? And why only 153 of them? I remember Bitfinex refused to reveal the addresses which contained the stolen coins, and now they report that the coins are moving. How do we know that these are the same addresses that the coins had been actually stolen from?

I seriously wonder if these stolen coins will ever be recovered? I mean, it doesn't seem impossible with companies devoted to blockchain analysis. Does anyone know of any examples of large Bitcoin thefts where the perpetrators were caught in the end?

Im afraid not enough analysis will ever be enough if they know what they are doing. All they need to do is run the coins through the Helix tumbler using Tor. Yes it will take a while since it has a limit of coins, so it will be made in small batches and some money will be lost due the fees, but they can end up cutting the trace of the coins. Unfortunately at that point it's clear the coins will never be ever recovered.

I agree, helix is a very powerful tumbler, i think it's the best tumbler in the world nowadays.

And we dont even have confidential transactions soon, and that mimble wimble thing.

Once all the privacy features are in full force, you can kiss goodbye, our stolen coins will never be given back to us ever again.

All i hope from those hacker attack, is that he or they cant sell the bitcoins, and once they deposit into exchanges they got funds frozen, and lost, soo exchanges can return the coins to bitfinex, this should happen at well know exchanges that does care bitcoin, but if im righ there are several exchanges that will be happy to get the fees from those big ammount and ignore the origin.

A lot of coins has been stolen in that past, its very possible that this coins are in move. Criminals cant sell all the coins at once, they are cleaver so they are dumping this stolen coins from time to time. Who knows how many stolen coins are currently in circulation, if any bitcoin is unique and cant be counterfeited can this stolen bitcoins be spotted somehow?

The mixer services are currently under scrutiny from most governments and they will possibly work with the authorities to identify

the people behind this hack. If they resist, they will just attract a lot of negative attention and they do not need that now. The

authorities do not need to ask nicely, they can just force them with a Subpoena through the courts. The exchanges is no problem,

because they already work with most governments, if they adhere to AML/KYC regulations.

How do you suggest a mixer like Bitmixer.io to provide any assistant to governments with or without court order when they literally have nothing to give them? or maybe you think they are lying about destroying all the logs after 24 hours?

All data can be retrieved with special forensic tools, if needed. I have recovered data, after it was formatted from a hard drive. So

nothing is impossible, if you really need to recover some sensitive information. I think they say that, but they still keep some data.

Some people think some of these mixer services are actually "honey traps" but I doubt it... that is just conspiracy theories.

Hopefully he won't be able to dump it or even better get caught doing it. I'm not sure how exactly he can do it though since all movements will be pretty clear, except for mixers but for that sum it would be crazy to use them. But that's only the start, the real issue will come if he wants to turn it into fiat, maybe he can do it with money launderers or in the black market. This will open the debate for fungibility really, some addresses and BTC will remain tainted even if we could accept them just the same there could be a time when exchanges or heavily regulated services won't and therefore making them less valuable...

Just saw the Gist File,needless to say Chris has organized it in a very readable way.I wonder what happens if the coins hit a mixer,we would sort of lose the track since mixer addresses process thousands of transactions daily.We can actually track of the primary address and see if it has been used in an exchange before to get further details.

If those bitcoin could be recovered, it will lead to more attraction about bitcoin. People will say: oh finally no so bad lol

I think it is the opposite, for what I can tell the bitcoin community seems to want better anonymity, if better anonymity is in fact enabled on bitcoin then you can forget about retrieving stolen coins or to even know the coins were stolen.

as this much humans keeping eyes on those transactions even after so long time seems like thieves are relly getting fucked up this time, they can not even touch those coins becuase that will panic everyone that someone is playing wih those stolen coins. why did someone even steel any thing which he can not even spend